Ohio – Male and female partners who take more than two caffeinated drinks each day within the weeks before conception may have an increased risk of miscarriage. A new study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that lifestyle factors in men are equally important than those in women, particularly in terms of caffeine intake.

The study was carried out by researchers at the Ohio State University and published Thursday in the journal Fertility and Sterility. The paper states that couples who drink over two daily caffeinated beverages during the first seven weeks of pregnancy saw a significantly increased risk of early pregnancy loss.

Male and female partners who take more than two caffeinated drinks each day within the weeks before conception may have an increased risk of miscarriage. Photo credit: The Ultimate Alpha Project

“Our findings also indicate that the male partner matters, too,” first study author said in a news release. “Male preconception consumption of caffeinated beverages was just as strongly associated with pregnancy loss as females’.”

Lead author Dr. Germaine Buck Louis said in a press release that the findings of this study provided useful information for those couples who want to plan a healthy pregnancy by reducing their risk of miscarriage. Buck Louis is the head of the Division of Intramural Population Health Research at NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The research team compared lifestyle factors among 334 couples with a singleton pregnancy from the weeks before conception through the seventh week of pregnancy. They examined data from a separate study of 501 couples from 12 counties in Texas and four counties in Michigan from 2005 to 2009.

Study authors applied hazard ratio, a statistical concept used to calculate the chances of a certain health outcome taking place during the time frame of the study. Scores higher than 1 meant an increased risk of early pregnancy loss each day following conception, while scores lower than 1 signaled a reduced risk.

Researchers noted that male and female intake of two caffeinated beverages daily was associated with an increased hazard ratio: 1.74 for females and 1.73 for males. As for the age by the time of pregnancy, they observed miscarriage was linked to females age of 35 and above, for a hazard ratio of 1.96. These chances were about twice the miscarriage risk of younger women.

Taking multivitamin reduces risk of early pregnancy loss

The findings also include that women who took a daily multivitamin before they conceived and during the first weeks of pregnancy were 55 percent less likely to miscarry than those women who did not. The hazard ratio for females taking a daily multivitamin during the preconception period was .45 and women who continued to take vitamins through early pregnancy saw a hazard ratio of .21, which means a risk reduction of 79 percent.